Sir Michael Caine credits being a wartime evacuee was "one of best things that ever happened" to him.
The 86-year-old actor was evacuated from his home during World War II and moved to a farm, where he only ate organic and healthy food.
He said: "I went with my mother and my brother. By this time I was seven and he was four and we went to a big farmhouse in Norfolk. That was a wonderful period. I spent four and a half years down there and I lived and worked on the farm. Actually, when you think in terms of the Second World War, from my point of view, it was one of the best things that happened to me.
"For a start, for six years, you could only get organic food. I grew up completely on organic food and never any chemicals. You couldn’t get sugar, sweet chocolate and all this, and cakes. Sugar had to be brought from Jamaica or somewhere and with U-boats, very few merchant ships got through. Typical of it was at Christmas, every child in England got a banana and an orange, but you never got one the rest of the year, because you couldn’t import them. The U-boats used to sink the merchant ships. So it was one of the best things that ever happened to me, the Second World War, but we don’t want a third one."
And the ‘Italian Job’ star was moved into a "luxurious" prefab house during the war after his own home was bombed.
Speaking to BBC radio, he added: "We were bombed out, so we got a prefab, which was luxury. If you lived in that area and you got a prefab like we did, I’d never lived in a house with central heating, running hot water, a bathroom, a refrigerator, and an electric light. I had never lived in a house and so when I moved in there it was like moving to Mayfair, except I didn’t know where Mayfair was. It was your own private space."
Sir Michael Caine grateful for wartime evacuation
